Friday, March 20, 2009

Listening to the Inner Voice

In my last entry, I touched on the refreshing feeling of shooting with a new lens, forcing my perspective with a new visual tool. Less than 24 hours later, I found myself stagnating over shooting another seascape.

Running on little sleep, I got up for sunrise with my ritual of sticking my head out the front door looking for clouds like a groundhog looking for its shadow on groundhog day. I drove up the coast only to drive back down again. Feeling disinterested, I pulled into Four Mile, a beach just north of Santa Cruz.

I set up as usual, found some mildly interesting compositions, but after just a few minutes and only nine clicks later, I packed up the wide angle lens.

You see, I kept hearing this voice inside my head. It was compelling me to try something new. Wave panning. It is a technique where you choose a relatively slow shutter speed like 1/4 second as in the photo above, and slowly pan the camera and lens with the direction of the wave.

The success rate is very low, and exposures were tricky. But I listened to that inner voice, and this time it didn't require spending money on a new lens as I had the right tool already.

A new kind of photographic learning experience, and a technique I hope to improve upon in the future.